Friday, September 27, 2013

Banana Chocolate Chip Walnut Loaf

I'd been having some trouble getting a banana loaf recipe right, but I've finally got one I'm happy with. Studded with chocolate chips and walnuts, it has a mild banana flavour and it's not very sweet either, so you may want to increase the amount of sugar in the recipe if you want a sweeter cake.

What's more, I used bananas I had frozen a week ago for this recipe. We had some overripe bananas (which are perfect for baking) but I didn't have time to bake with them so I popped them in the freezer. Saturday night I took them out to thaw and used them up Sunday morning. They will blacken further on freezing so don't let that alarm you, they're perfectly fine to bake with. They're a bit watery once they've thawed though so peel the bananas and place them in a strainer for a while to drain the excess liquid. Then mash them up and into the cake batter they go!

Ingredients

3 oz butter

⅓ cup brown sugar

2 eggs

1½ cups flour

1½ teaspoons baking powder

⅓ cup milk

½ cup mashed banana

⅓ to ½ cup walnuts, chopped

3 tablespoons chocolate chips

½ tsp vanilla

Preheat the oven to 350⁰F (180⁰C).

Sift together the flour and baking powder and set aside.

Add the butter and sugar to a large mixing bowl and, with an electric mixer, beat together until light and creamy (about 2 minutes).

Add the eggs, one at a time, and mix well after adding each one.

With the mixer on low speed, alternately add the flour mixture and milk.